Motivation: Due to recent interest in the use of textual material to augment traditional experiments it has become necessary to automatically cluster, classify and filter natural language information. Results: The Simple and Robust Abbreviation Dictionary (SaRAD) provides an easy to implement, high performance tool for the construction of a biomedical symbol dictionary. The algorithms, applied to the MEDLINE document set, result in a high quality dictionary and toolset to disambiguate abbreviation symbols automatically. Availability: The SaRAD tool, supplementary information and pseudo-code are available at http://www.hpl.hp.com/shl/projects/abbrev.html